democracy | the brilliantly leaping gazelle

May 3, 2025

34:63 presents “Asterix”

I must confess to feeling slightly disappointed upon waking this morning to discover that the sky hadn’t fallen in. Because yesterday, the media were full of either grim pronouncements or jubilant celebrations about exactly what Reforms UK’s performance in Thursdays elections meant for the future of British politics.

Brexit, as it is for most things nowadays, was involved, being the catalyst that lay behind this wholly predictable, and indeed, widely predicted drubbing. Indeed, in all the coverage I’ve read, what is striking is just how much opinions are shaped by Brexit. In a tangential yet unremarked way, Brexit was but a symptom of a greater, more fundamental problem confronting democracy, not just in the UK, but elsewhere. One that moreover, has the capacity to fatally undermine it by using its own inherent flaws to achieve this, voter turnout, or more accurately, voter absence.

In all of the mayoral elections contested on Thursday, not one of them had a voter turnout of more than 34% and neither of the ones that elected Reform UK mayors managed even 30%. Why no media attention is being given to this problem is beyond me, especially as a little over a year ago the dangers were revealed to exist.

Remember George Galloway’s campaign in the Rochdale by-election last year? Where he made it clear from the outset that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale – 30% of its population – and instead of focusing on local or even national issues, but rather on Israel/Gaza? It was an act of effectively strategic masterstroke, resulting him getting 40% of all the votes cast, which sounds impressive, until you realise only 39.7% of voters actually bothered to. And then suddenly that 40% seems even less impressive, especially when you realise that that once impressive 40% translates into 12,335 actual votes.

This trick – targeting a specific community and focusing on an issue not directly related to their daily lives – was repeated a few months later at the 2024 general election. Whilst George Galloway wasn’t re-elected, five candidates were, all pandering to concerns of a minority but crucially, a minority who turned out to vote. Together with Jeremy Corblimey, they formed the Independent Alliance and their ranks could easily have been increased to nine, because three candidates, standing on a similar platform were narrowly defeated.

It isn’t that surprising that Labour is so quiet on this issue – low voter turnout – because it suited them very well at the 2024 general election. Despite the fact there was a load of guff in some of the media about how constituency boundary changes and the need for voter I.D would work against Labour, like so much political speculation, that didn’t happen. Voter turnout was about 60%, and despite Labour getting a lower share of that, 34%, somehow they got 412 seats or 63% of them.

Some awfully clever people have worked out that the you take into account the number that did vote for them, the number that didn’t and the number of people who could have voted but chose not to, combine all of that and only 20% of the UK electorate did so. Of course the media are predicting all manner of things, because that’s what the media do. Political forecasting is as good at predicting the future as reading tea-leaves, checking ones horoscope or listening to a clairvoyant.

Its much easier than them questioning why this keeps happening, why political parties have consistently failed to engage with voters the way seem all to happy to do with lobbyists. And by not doing this, they’re not only perpetuating the problem, they’re failing to do their job. Nearly as much as the politicians.

March 22, 2024

Schrodinger’s cat meets democracy

The result of the recent Irish referendum was many things and I’ll leave it to those more knowledgeable in Irish politics to expound upon the issues it raises. Much has been made of the decision to even hold a referendum regarding changes to the constitution in the first place. There are many problems facing Ireland right now and holding a referendum on something that wasn’t one of them seemed as if it was an exercise in political virtue signalling. One which indicated how in touch with the values and language of now the political class were, by indicating how out of touch they were with the concerns of ordinary Irish citizens.

An example being that changes to the the wording of the constitution are not exactly on a par with proposed cull of 200,000 dairy cows – 10% of the total – in order to better meet the Irish governments goal of reducing agricultural emissions by 25% by 2030. And whilst tinkering with some of wording of the constitution looked good to people who are inordinately pre-occupied with looking good, it also had the added benefit of seemingly coming with no cost, whereas the cull is estimated to cost £600Million.

But come at a cost it did and whilst much was made of the seemingly low turnout – 44% as compared with 2018’s repeal of the abortion law which had 66.5% – even the most cursory of looks at voter turnout reveals just how low it actually was. In parts of the capital Dublin and at least four counties, turnout was estimated to be no higher than 12 per cent and although turnout was high in some places – 46% in other parts of Dublin – there was an overwhelmingly sense of voter apathy. This the nightmare scenario that awaits both main parties in the forthcoming UK election if they fail to engender anything even approaching a sense of it being anything other than the outcome being a foregone conclusion. The victory of George Galloway in Rochdale underlies the reality of this prediction.

As noted in a previous blog post, there were many things I found highly disagreeable about George Galloway’s campaign, but no matter how calculated one considers his campaign to have been, it was undeniably effective. Making it clear that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale that made up 30% of its population and shifting the focus away from local or even national issues, but instead onto Israel/Gaza was an act of effective strategic masterstroke. It paid off, resulting him getting 40% of all the votes cast, which sounds impressive, until you realise only 39.7% of voters actually bothered to. And then suddenly that 40% seems even less impressive, especially when you realise that that once impressive 40% translates into 12,335 actual votes.

A pathetic inditement of our political apathy, made all the more pathetic when one realises there are 26 constituencies with a majority of less than 1000, each notionally at risk from a well co-ordinated and highly motivated grassroots campaign. Which is both a good and a bad thing for democracy. Good, because it allows people to become properly invested in participatory democracy in a meaningful, not theoretical way, and to decide for themselves what issues are important to them, not have them dictated by a party machine. That is also the bad thing, because as Galloway’s victory in Rochdale shows, the numbers needed to win were not big and therefore permits to a certain kind of activism, as factional as it is unrepresentative. Certainly nowhere near cohesive enough to engender solidity with other similar victors on a regional, never mind national stage.

That’s why to me, the results of the Irish referendum and Rochdale are one and the same, bringing in their wake the warning of voter disengagement with the entire political process. Of how that sense of disengagement, that apathy, could be turned on itself, be weaponised and ruthlessly exploited in the pursuit of a rigidly exclusionary agenda.

Think of those 12,335 votes and tell me I’m dreaming.

March 5, 2024

Forest Gump’s mum meets Winston Churchill

The most depressing thing about the way in which the entire political class and their fawning sycophants in the media reacted to George Galloways’ electoral victory in Rochdale the other night was that it reminded me of how they’d all reacted after the Brexit vote. With an almost tedious inevitability, there was the same anguished newspaper headlines, the same acres of newsprint opining at length about what it said about Britain, about how it was a sad day for democracy, even down to the PM giving a speech outside No.10.

The statesman like thing to have done would’ve been for Loafer to be gracious in defeat and to admit that whilst he had lost, democracy had won. To position himself was a staunch defender of the democratic ideal, that how he felt about the result was ultimately of no consequence. But no. He somehow managed to conflate Galloways victory and the beliefs of some of the people who supported him as evidence of “our democracy itself being a target”

The thing is, it’s a teensy-teensy bit cheeky for Loafer to even mention democracy being a target, given the obscenely undemocratic way he became PM in the first place, in an act of political chicanery that would’ve made even Kim Jong-un blush. He is to democracy what Prince Harry is to reticence. At least his predecessor, Letttuce, was elected, even if it was only by 80,000 Conservative Party members. The last PM to be elected because of an actual general election was Boris’s Johnson, back in 2019.

Secondly did any Cabinet Ministers travel up to Rochdale to support the Conservative candidate Paul Ellison, especially after the Labour candidate was withdrawn? The media were all too aware of the potential for a Galloway win, most obviously because it allowed them to pontificate upon how disastrous an outcome this would be, so it follows that Loafer and Co were aware too. So where was the one time only coalition of all three main parties suspending business as usual and uniting behind a common cause to defeat Galloway? And instead of sounding all high and mighty about putting country before party like all politicians are always testiculating about, maybe actually doing it?

Galloway won Rochdale thanks in part to a low voter turnout – 39.7% as compared to the 60.1% in 2019 – and of that he only managed to 40%. Basically, 12,335 votes. Essentially if the main political parties couldn’t be even bothered to show up, then why should the voters? Worryingly, a couple of candidates whose names appeared on the ballot paper but were withdrawn before the election itself nevertheless managed somehow get a combined total of nearly 3,000 votes. And that leads neatly onto another threat to democracy.

Politicians themselves.

They are increasingly out of touch with the everyday concerns of the people they claim to serve, hardly a surprise when one realises the huge disparity between them and rest of the population. In 2019, research revealed the sheer scale of this grotesque reality. 44% of Tory MPs, 38% of Lib-Dem ones and 19% of Labour ones went to to fee paying – private – schools, as compared to 6% for the rest of us. It gets worse, as most of the Tory ones – 61% of that 44% – are in Loafer’s Cabinet, and 45% lot of that went to Oxbridge.

Less than 1% of the rest of us do. Unsurprisingly, this disparity stretches into the upper echelons of the civil service, the media and business.

No wonder then that a kind of group-think takes place, one that allows an echo chamber of ideological conformity to flourish and for dissenting opinions to be seldom heard. And that danger to democracy extends to the judiciary; senior judges being the most unrepresentative group of them all, with 67% attending private schools and 71% graduating from Oxbridge, with 11 of the judges on the Supreme Court thusly educated. Puts the legal challenges to Brexit into a harsher light, to say nothing of the Supreme Court unanimously ruling that Boris’s Johnson had “unlawfully” prorogued – suspended – parliament for five weeks. Effectively thwarting, albeit temporally, his ability to carry out the wishes of the majority of the UK population

Much like the Brexit vote, there was a lot of scare-mongering by the commentariat and grim predictions of doom that were better suited to Macbeth, but that didn’t prevent the shocked disbelief and abject bewilderment of the entire political class when the lower orders actually used democracy to be actively involved in their own lives. Possibly not enough of them made full advantage of that possibility in Rochdale, but whose fault is that? That’s one of the great strengths of democracy, which is why the right to vote was very begrudgingly and even more incrementally broadened to eventually encompass all citizens. Just as people are sometimes contrary, often unpredictable and frequently unfathomable, so too can be election results.

And as I pointed out in a previous blog, Galloways self-professed and ruthlessly focused targeting of Rochdale’s Muslim population may well have been distasteful, but from another point of view, a brilliant piece of strategic thinking, one which all of the other parties have always used. Indeed election night analysis almost fetishises the possibility of marginal seats being lost to a rival party, often cutting away so we can see the winner bask in their fleeting moment in the spotlight. And with an emboldened Galloway eyeing up marginal seats – 25 of which have majority of less than 1,000 – the results may not be to everyone’s liking, but isn’t that the point of democracy, losers consent?

To quote Forest Gumps’ mum ‘Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what your gonna get.’